Thursday, April 27, 2017

Jane Weaver's forthcoming Modern Kosmology album is out May 19 on Fire Records. Check the clip below.

Alone in a home-spun cocoon with a metronomic heartbeat and the phasing voice of her former and future selves, Jane Weaver is preparing for the launch of her new album Modern Kosmology (out May 19th) and sees her on an extensive tour across the UK and Ireland through October and November.

Self taught, self penned, self played, self produced, and all-autonomous Jane Weaver's Modern Kosmology is by no means a reclusive mission. Heavily influenced by a cast of lesser-known spiritual muse (such as automatic abstract painter Hilma Af Klint and her fabled pre-surrealist secret society) Jane also enlists the physical skills of CAN's Malcolm Mooney amongst a skeleton crew of Mancunian drum-lords and well versed psychedelic axe-men to punctuate Jane's synth-loaded sonic architecture. Jane's unwaning yearning for psychoactive pop energy has just reached a new level of magnetism. As snowclones go, Modern Kosmology is the new Silver. Another Spectrum to add to the tension.

Watch the video of Jane in Eve Studios with her trusty Roland string synth and Korg Poly Ensemble P as she discusses her evolution since the 2014 release of The Silver Globe. Modern Kosmology is available for pre-order via Fire Records right here, with first single Slow Motion available to hear and download instantly at www.janeweavermusic.com

Thursday, April 13, 2017

The Ecstatic Music Of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda is out May 5 on Luaka Bop.

Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s devotion to spirituality was the central purpose of the final four decades of her life, an often-overlooked awakening that largely took shape during her four-year marriage to John Coltrane and after his 1967 death. By 1983, Alice had established the 48-acre Sai Anantam Ashram outside of Los Angeles. She quietly began recording music from the ashram, releasing it within her spiritual community in the form of private press cassette tapes. Luaka Bop will release World Spirituality Classics, Volume 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda on May 5, the first installment in a planned series of spiritual music from around the globe.

This largely unheard body of work finds Alice singing for the first time in her recorded catalog, which dates back to 1963 and includes appearances on six John Coltrane albums, alongside Charlie Haden and McCoy Tyner, and 14 albums as bandleader starting with her Impulse! debut in 1967 with A Monastic Trio. The songs featured on the Luaka Bop release have been culled from the four cassettes that Alice recorded and released between 1982 and 1995: ‘Turiya Sings,’ ‘Divine Songs,’ ‘Infinite Chants,’ and ‘Glorious Chants.’ The digital, cassette and CD release will feature eight songs. The double-vinyl edition features two additional tracks, “Krishna Japaye” from 1990’s ‘Infinite Chants, and the previously unreleased “Rama Katha” from a separate Turiya Sings recording session. You can hear the entire Turiya Sings album at the end of this post.

Luaka Bop teamed with Alice’s children to find the original master tapes in the Coltrane archive. The recordings were prepared for re-mastering by the legendary engineer Baker Bigsby (Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, John Coltrane), who had overseen the original sessions in the 80s and 90s. The compilation showcases a diverse array of recordings in addition to Alice’s first vocal work: solo performances on her harp, small ensembles, and a 24-piece vocal choir. The release is dotted with eastern percussion, synthesizers, organs and strings, making for a mesmerizing, even otherworldly, listen. Alice was inspired by Vedic devotional songs from India and Nepal, adding her own music sensibility to the mix with original melodies and sophisticated song structures. She never lost her ability to draw from the bebop, blues and old-time spirituals of her Detroit youth, fusing a Western upbringing with Eastern classicism. In all, these recordings amount to a largely untold chapter in the life story of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda.

In addition to the recordings, GRAMMY-winning music historian Ashley Kahn has written extensive liner notes on the collection. The package also includes a series of interviews with those who knew Alice best, conducted by Dublab’s Mark “Frosty” McNeill, and an as-told-to interview between musician Surya Botofasina (who was raised on Alice’s ashram) and journalist Andy Beta. Here's the tracklisting.

Saturday, April 8, 2017

The 14-track Function Underground LP comes with a download card w/ WAV files out April 22.

Function Underground: The Black and Brown American Rock Sound, 1969-74 is an anthology of vintage DIY African-American heavy rock recordings by the likes of Jimi Macon, Black Maffia, Blacklites and a whole bunch of other important but largely overlooked artists from the early 70s slated for release on Record Store Day. Here's the scoop on Now Again's new compilation which – interestingly enough – takes it's name from a We The People heavy-funk instrumental recorded for Darlene Records and reissued by Numero Group on the Eccentric Soul: Mighty Mike Lenaburg comp back in 2006...

Nearly everyone in the world can rattle off the great African-American musical forms. Jazz, blues, R&B, soul, hip-hop, house, gospel. One influential genre is always left off of the list: a folk music known as rock n’ roll. Rock n’ roll was a term originally coined to market the white-friendly version of a genre that already existed; prior to 1965, the line between rock n’ roll and R&B was thin: Ike Turner recorded and released “Rocket ‘88’ ” in 1951 and, while its Chess Records release reached number one on the Billboard R&B chart, it is regarded by many as the first rock n’ roll record.

The Great Divide between R&B and rock n’ roll came after the Beatles and the British Invasion decimated the Top 40 chart in 1964. Simultaneously, R&B entered a new phase, soon to be labeled “soul,” which upped the music’s gospel quotient and turned its frantic twang. So somewhere in the mid to late-1960s, rock n’ roll became perceived as something for the Caucasian kids. When Jimi Hendrix and Arthur Lee made the scene, they were said to be black musicians entering into a white world. While that couldn’t be farther from the truth, that false dichotomy has existed in America’s popular conscious ever since, to the point where the idea of a black rock musician is on the level with the idea of a black cowboy.

In the mid-1960s, funk replaced soul as the rhythm that was going to move the world. We know all its progenitor – James Brown, The Meters, Kool & The Gang – and their innovations: the syncopated, 4/4 dance between the bass and drums, horns repurposed as percussion, chicken-scratch and wah-wah guitar. We can trace where they came from. But there is one crucial funk influence that no one seems to want to acknowledge – a devil-may-care attitude we can attribute to rock n’ roll. It’s not a stretch to say that funk is the African-American answer to psychedelia and hard rock rolled into one.

The idea of “progressivism” that took over rock music after psychedelia’s heyday in the late 1960s belatedly spilled over to funk. In the early 1970s, as the underground/psychedelic fire burnt out in the white rock world, it roared to a blaze in the black musical community. Nearly every American city with a large black population boasted self-contained funk bands that didn’t consider themselves simply revues or backup groups, but rather fully-operational ensembles In these bands, everything from composing, arranging, record production and distribution, was handled in house by band members. These are the bands whose music comprises this anthology, and while they’re all different, they’re unique in one way: they kept their ears open for new developments in funk and rock music.

This anthology presents earnest questions as to why we know so little about these bands and the movement of which they were a part. While we don’t anticipate that we’ll ever find a definitive answer as to what these ensembles’ true goals were, then, we do know that they took their charges seriously. And they knew they were onto something different, something that, though only they and their immediate kin might recognize it, was more interesting than the status quo. Function Underground shines light on an important and overlooked part of rock n’ roll’s history and talented ensembles that toiled in the shadows, derided by their peers.

“Do you realize that Hendrix was dead before most black people in America knew he was a black man?” Ebony Rhythm Band drummer Matthew Watson questions rhetorically. “We was scorned. In that era, everybody else in the black community was wearing three-piece suits, processes and Afro wigs and that shit. We was the first guys to wear bell bottoms. The first guys to wear big hats. We were off into a whole other thing.”

Sunday, April 2, 2017

Only 300 copies of Am I Really Here All Alone? by Toronto's Philip Lewin were issued in 1975. Read all about it.

Philip Lewin recalls Am I Really Here All Alone...
"In 1967 I began my life in the student union of a university. In other words, I was in school. But, classes definitely took a back seat to people-watching and attempts at relationships. I would not say that I was particularly good at the latter, but I made a great observer. I even stayed near the school community for an extra year until an opportunity came up to move in with friends in Toronto, Canada, which turned out to be a pivotal opportunity for me.

"I was once told that one should first write about one's own experiences, then, expand to documenting the observed experiences of those around, and, finally write about what one imagines. Am I Really Here All Alone? encompasses all of the above. Something else I realized in writing lyrics is that sometimes it is good to be transparent about the meaning and others times, not so much. 'Unusual Day' is an example of me being honest struggling to develop and maintain a relationship, but ultimately realizing it was not going to succeed.

"'Watercolours' documents a crushing experience, but is couched in metaphor. I hope that listeners will relate through their own experiences, and because my reality is implied, not specified, will not be limited to mine. 'Sweet Georgia' is an example of me, as a writer, leaving my personal space. I think of it as an attempt to clone William Faulkner to Bobbie Gentry. 'The Magic Within You' is actually a commission where I was asked to write a song for a benefit to be performed by Doug Henning, the groundbreaking stage magician and friend. I once heard John Prine complain that there was no point in writing a 'train song' because Steve Goodman had already written the perfect one with 'City of New Orleans'.

"Naturally, I had to write 'Back Home, To You', my idea of a train song where I tried to capture the movement of the train in the rhythm of the guitar. As for the other six songs, to me, they all reflect realities, experienced, observed and imagined. Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." However my question is, Am I Really Here All Alone?"

The debut album by Nashville's Savoy Motel comes from a pedigree of garage, punk, and power-pop groups – bassist Jeffrey Novak founded both Cheap Time; drummer Jessica McFarland was also in Cheap Time, and played in Heavy Cream with guitarists Dillon Watson and Mimi Galbierz. Savoy Motel transposes the energy and hooks of those groups to an entirely different move: a skillfully orchestrated hybrid of glam rock, soul and dance music delivered with the sort of showmanship that's closer in spirit to Redd Kross than anything on the contemporary garage scene. “We use rock and roll as a vehicle to reach and promote the feeling of TOTAL FREEDOM,” claims Dillon. “Savoy Motel is defined more by a feeling than a sound.”

Savoy Motel achieves a compositional harmony through the meshing of the clockwork precision in the rhythms of each song, with Jessica hammering out the beats alongside a vintage Rhythm King drum machine, and Mimi locking in on guitar, alongside the interplay of three lead vocalists, while Dillon rips intense fuzz leads on every track, and Jeffrey adds the hooks on his bass. Dillon remarks: “After Jeffrey repeatedly insisted that I play more and more like Jimi and Clapton, I realized that he wanted the shit to rock, and that he was not only unafraid of, but actually going for what a lot of contemporaries would consider faux pas. I think we were all ready for something radical and new, and Jeffrey was ready to lead us there.”

The whole package opens up their horizons, and yours, to a sound made by four friends tired of witnessing music eat its own tail; with unclouded judgment, creative refinements, and peerless technique, they grab that tail and stick it into a wall socket, putting the cap back on 15+ years of rock revivalism and strident genre adherence. And they make it seem easy. If it was that easy, though, everybody else would be doing it. Look around you. That’s not happening. Savoy Motel is happening. “Whatever musical past we had feels obsolete compared to what we’re doing now,” says Jeffrey. “The past turned its back on us, so we had to turn our backs on the past in order to find our future.”

The band just completed a hugely successful tour with The Lemon Twigs, including a sold out Bowery Ballroom in NYC. They just announced a few more shows of their own including a Toronto date at Smiling Buddha on May 16. Check the complete list of tour dates following the song clips from their debut below.